Wednesday, January 25, 2017

On Nostalgia

By Matthew Stephen Sunrich

I was in ninth grade, in 1989, when
I experienced nostalgia for the first time.

I had recently begun collecting
comics, and while flipping through an issue of The Incredible Hulk from early in the decade, which I had gotten
from a friend along with a stack of others, I ran across an advertisement for a
book of puzzles and games featuring characters from classic video games
(Pac-Man, Q*Bert, et al). You might recall how they merchandized the crap out
of these characters during the so-called Golden Age of Arcade Games. I remember
stuffed animals, PVC figurines, t-shirts, candy, and jewelry, amongst tons of
other junk.

I had, of course, been a video-game
enthusiast since 1980, when I played Pac-Man
in the local Kroger for the first time (I had no idea what I was doing, but I was
hooked). I spent a lot of time in arcades, which in those days were everywhere.
I grew up in a pretty small town, and we had at least five or six of them. I
didn't get an Atari 2600 until the price went down to twenty-five bucks
(despite numerous attempts, I could never get my dad to shell out the bread for
one before this development, even though he bought a Commodore Vic-20, which I
really only used as a video-game console), but my cousin had one, and we spent
an insane amount of time playing it. My uncle even subscribed to some sort of "cartridge
of the month" club that mailed new games to you every few weeks. We were,
perhaps not surprisingly, completely oblivious to the fact that the market
crashed in 1983; all we knew was that you could suddenly get Atari games for
pennies on the dollar.

Since then, I had graduated to the
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), which I still consider the greatest
console ever made. Even though it had only been seven or eight years since the
Atari heyday, video games, both home and arcade versions, had changed immensely
in that time. Even though we played a lot of Atari, we often complained about
the poor quality of the graphics and gameplay. The home ports didn't come
anywhere close to stacking up to their arcade counterparts (the worst example
of this was, of course, the Atari port of Pac-Man,
which was infamously thrown together quickly so it could reach stores by the
Christmas season and was a major contributor to the aforementioned crash). We
always hoped for something better. When the NES hit, it felt like we had
entered a completely different world.

I had fallen in love with Super Mario Bros. and played it in the
Wal-Mart game room several days a week (I must admit that I once wet my pants
in front of the machine because I refused to leave the game to go to the
bathroom, which is pathetic behavior usually reserved for Las Vegas slot-machine
jockeys). When I learned that the NES version was virtually identical (it turns
out that there were actually some
pretty significant differences, coupled with the fact that the game had originally been released on the Famicon Disk
System in Japan before the arcade version was released, but I was blissfully
unaware of any of this), I couldn't believe it. The idea of a home system that
was the equal of an arcade machine was a revolutionary idea. Even though my dad
had been hesitant to buy an Atari at full price, he was willing to put an NES
under the Christmas tree in 1987. (I was, ahem, relieved to find that the home
version had a pause feature, thus obviating all future urine-related mishaps).

As I sat looking at the
advertisement in that comic book, I began to feel peculiar. A warmth overcame
me, and I was filled with a profound sense of contentment. I had no idea what I
was experiencing at the time, but I soon came to realize that it was nostalgia.
While seven years feels like nothing to me now, in 1989 it was half of my life.
As images of the hours spent playing Atari at my cousin's apartment ran through
my mind, I began to long for those bygone days. It was a simpler time, a time
before the drama of junior high and high school, a time when no one really
cared where your shoes came from or whether or not you were privy to the latest
fads. I remembered days when I had to stay out of school due to illness, and my
mom would take me to the Harbin Clinic and then to Revco so my prescription
could be filled. I reminisced about Saturday afternoons with her at Madden's
Cheese Ltd. at the corner of Gala Shopping Center, where I'd get a sandwich and
watch the ABC Weekend Special on the
television on top of the drink cooler. I thought of seemingly insignificant
trips I'd take with my dad to stores around town, where I'd get candy
dispensers shaped like Star Wars
characters or cheap toys that would invariably become part of some collection
or other within the microcosm of my bedroom closet.

More than anything, though, I
thought about what it was like being a kid. Were things actually better back
then? Probably not, but my memory had romanticized those times, made them seem
preferable to what my life had become in the ensuing years. I had grown to
associate my life with my hobbies and pastimes. They had practically become my
identity, and, thus, much of my nostalgia was inextricably linked to them. As I
closed the cover of that comic, I found myself wanting more. It became
something of an addiction. I began seeking out old (or old to me, anyway) books
and magazines, ones that just about anyone else would find uninteresting. I
once found a stack of yellowed video-game strategy guides at a used bookstore
for about a quarter apiece. These days, those kinds of books are highly sought
after by collectors, but back then no one else cared. I was ahead of the curve.
Nostalgia for me is not just about video games, though; they were just the key
that unlocked the vault and remain the best sources of it. Anything that
reminds me of the 1980s is usually worth a look, especially if it's related to
one of the speculative genres.

I continue to take frequent trips
down memory lane. The creation of MAME (Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator), which I
can play on my laptop, provides doses of arcade nostalgia whenever I desire
them, and the proliferation of plug-and-play consoles featuring both arcade and
home games has made access to the past easier than ever (I'll refrain from
expressing my anger concerning the NES Classic Edition debacle at this
juncture). Moreover, YouTube is a treasure trove of 1980s cartoons and
commercials, as well as videos of people playing video games on every system
imaginable.

Interestingly enough, I have found
that there are two kinds of nostalgia: actual nostalgia and what I like to call
"pseudo-nostalgia." The latter is a peculiar thing indeed, but I in all
ways embrace it. It allows me to look at something that I'm not familiar with
from a particular era and get a feeling of nostalgia from it even though it was
something outside my sphere of experience. I never played the Bally Astrocade,
for example, but when I see an ad for it or read an article in an issue of Electronic Games, I can experience
nostalgia because it is from the same time period that I was playing Burgertime and Tempest in the arcade. I also have a collection of old role-playing
game (RPG) books and magazines (some of which I've found online in PDF format
for free) from which I derive a great deal of joy, even though I didn't
discover those kinds of games until around the time that I got into comics. I
love looking through them and imagining how exciting it must have been for
those early players, when RPGs were just beginning to ramp up and everything
was so new.